Deep in this impressive, disturbing study of U.S. Army leadership, Thomas E. Ricks offers his explanation of why the Iraq war seemed to spiral out of control even after Saddam Hussein was toppled and his army defeated.

The fault was not with the U.S. Army's rank and file, Ricks concludes. "It was a well-trained, professional, competent force," he writes. "But the soldiers were often better at their tasks than the generals who were leading them were at theirs. In Iraq, the U.S. Army would illustrate the danger of viewing war too narrowly."

A former military beat reporter at the Washington Post and Wall Street Journal, Ricks is swinging for the fences in "The Generals," analyzing the performance of generals and the civilian leaders who oversee them from Pearl Harbor to Iraq and Afghanistan.

He remembers the slam once used to describe the British army as "lions led by donkeys."

His conclusions are stark, fact-based and strongly argued: The U.S. Army is often led by generals who are masterful at combat tactics, at converging battalions on an agreed-upon enemy target, but woefully inept at recognizing changes in the battlefield, like the emergence of an insurgency in Iraq or the re-emergence of the Taliban in Afghanistan.

In Panama in 1989, Iraq in 1991 and 2003 and Afghanistan in 2001, "Army generals would lead swift attacks against enemy forces yet do so without a notion of what to do the day after their initial triumph, and in fact believing that it was not their job to consider the question."

Ricks is not reluctant to name names, among them Gen. Tommy Franks, who led U.S. forces in Afghanistan and then Iraq, and Franks' successor in Iraq, Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez.

"Most generals, at worst, get the opportunity to lose one war," Ricks writes. "Franks bungled two in just three years." Ricks blames Franks, "that most graceless sort of leader, both dull and arrogant," for blowing a chance to kill or capture Osama bin Laden when he was cornered in the Tora Bora mountains in late 2001.

"Franks seemed inattentive, almost as if the battle were someone else's problem," he writes.

In Iraq, Sanchez appeared not to understand the insurgency or have a strategy to fight it. "Sanchez compounded the problem through smallness of mind and inflexibility of approach. He did not seem willing to learn and adapt."

Ricks names as exemplars Martin Dempsey, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff; Gen. David Petraeus, who resigned recently as head of the CIA; and Marine Gen. James Mattis, who led Marines in Afghanistan and Iraq and succeeded Petraeus as commanding general of the U.S. Central Command.